At last, the question that has kept us up at night all of these years.
Ever tried to set off ten minutes’ worth of fireworks in ten seconds?
Of course not, you’re currently alive and reading this.
Well, have you ever wondered how much effort goes into planning a fireworks show?
YouTuber Tom Scott decided to do both in his latest video, although he wasn’t necessarily looking to see what the big bang would look like at the very end.
Rest assured, we get to see the explosion, but he also wanted to look at the accidents that surround large fire displays.
“There are plenty of stories and videos of fireworks display companies that have made the same change by accident,” he told the Press Association.
“In the media [this] is called a technical hitch, or worse human error. The investigation ends there. Someone hit the button wrong, that it explains it. We don’t need to look any further.”
So he put together his own show, in which 10 minutes’ worth of fireworks would be launched in 10 seconds. The aim was to prove just how much effort it would take to “accidentally” set off every single firework in a display simultaneously.
“This isn’t about fireworks,” he said. “It’s about anything that is somehow one human error away from disaster.”
“Companies who mistreat personal data; engineers working on live databases without a backup; construction workers moving heavy equipment – human error is rarely, if ever, a root cause,” Scott went on to say.
“There’s something in the environment which turned that human error into a much bigger problem.”
I know what you’re thinking. Can we just see the fireworks explosion already?
Knock yourself out (not literally, please):
Clip via Tom Scott
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